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The Megillah, Rep. Omar, and Where We Go From Here

This post is based on the D'var Torah I gave at services on Saturday, March 9, 2019. I also plan another post with some thoughtful articles on the topic from other sources.

I always set out extra books for services in addition to the Siddurim (prayerbooks), on the cart outside the Sanctuary and in the small Chapel too. They are not just for you; when I am not leading a service, I use them too! On Thursday evening in the Chapel, I took a Tanakh (Bible) instead of a Siddur and read from the Megillah, the story of Esther. We are in the month leading up to Purim in less than two weeks.

For most of us, the Bible that’s most familiar is a kind of Sunday School Bible. The Book of Esther that we have learned that way is a hilarious story. Even in the parts related to Haman’s plot to get rid of all the Jews, the story is funny and over the top. The Megillah is like that all the way through Haman’s being finally exposed and then executed by the king.

In the real, complete Tanakh, that’s not the whole story. There’s a lot more text, and it is not at all funny.

On Thursday night, what I did was to read the Megillah to myself, but starting at chapter 8. That chapter follows immediately the demise of Haman. Mordechai is installed in power by King Achashverosh in Haman’s place. But when Queen Esther asks the king to revoke his original edict against the Jews, the king says he is powerless to do that. All he can do is to authorize them to fight back legally, with another royal edict. Chapters 8-9 tell about the many people Jews kill all over the empire as they defend themselves, and they tell the fear that the Jews elicit because of their fierce response. Here is a verse you most certainly did not learn in Hebrew School:
וְרַבִּים מֵעַמֵּי הָאָרֶץ מִתְיַהֲדִים כִּי־נָפַל פַּחַד־הַיְּהוּדִים עֲלֵיהֶם: …V’rabim me-amay ha-aretz mityahadim ki nafal pachad hayehudim alayhem -- "many among the peoples of the land passed themselves off as Jewish, because fear of the Jews had fallen over them” (Esther 8:17).

Achashverosh, the king, comes across in the last three chapters as someone who loves his Jewish wife Esther, who appreciates or at least respects his new Jewish vizier Mordechai. And as someone who possibly feels intimidated by them, doing what he needs to do in the moment to restore peace and to stay in power.

Once the fighting dies down, Esther and Mordechai institute the annual festival of Purim. It’s a celebration of the reversal of fortunes for the Jews, and includes also mishloach manot and matanot la’evyonim -- bringing gifts to each other and helping those in need.

Chapters 8-10 of the Megillah are about Jewish power established in the immediate wake of vulnerability. They are about having powerful allies and knowing that alliance comes from both love of us and fear of us. They are about figuring out what to do with Jewish power and the power of our allies. And they are about what it’s like to remember a recent threat, to remember fear, from the vantage point of more recently achieved power. They are about figuring out what to do with this power going forward -- when to unleash it and when to worry about what it does to us.

I selected this part of the Megillah to read and meditate on Thursday evening, because it was a spot-on text for this past week. Reading it felt unsettling and reassuring at the same time. Which is exactly how I have felt all week as the controversy surrounding Rep. Ilhan Omar from my great home state of Minnesota continued to unfold. The words of hers were straight out of the Megillah -- fear of the power of the Jews. I had all these kinds of reflections during the week: It was good to see the power we have as American Jews at work against repeated slanders rooted in anti-Semitic stereotypes. It felt strange and weird to be the center of attention once again, so soon after Pittsburgh, which I have certainly not yet gotten over. I wondered whether I am living up to the responsibility that comes with so many people paying attention to anti-Semitism -- whether I have been a person who fights against hate directed at others as fully as I expect others to fight against hate directed at us.

It is important, it is spiritually critical, to have a swirl of these kinds of reactions, and not to let ourselves settle on only one. If we are only thinking one thing right now -- if we are not acknowledging the many such reactions within our own community -- we are lying to ourselves, and hiding from ourselves and from each other -- and from our responsibilities.

I want to fill in some information, and then propose a way of thinking about our responsibilities. What’s the mitzvah here always has to be the grounding Jewish question.

Part of what I say I hope has merit for you because I personally hear Rep. Omar and am horrified out of my own religious, leftish Zionism. I have said from the bimah (pulpit) in the past that the eventual freedom of Palestinians as a nation will become part of our own Jewish story of being agents of freedom in the world. I have been involved for a long time in AIPAC, where my view about the Palestinians is widely and openly shared, though probably not by the majority. If your perspective in anywhere near that, or anywhere to the right of it, I think you’ll be able to hear me.

Part of what I can tell you is because I’m a Minnesotan, and I know rabbis who live and work in the Minnesota 5th, Rep. Omar’s congressional district -- particularly rabbis involved in progressive circles. They have been right in the middle of trying to fix things; they are the people most frustrated by Rep. Omar's repeated slanders. The district includes the city of Minneapolis and many of its first-ring suburbs, including St. Louis Park, which is the Brookline-Newton of Minneapolis. Some of the Jews you may know of who grew up there: former Sen. Al Franken, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Columbia University development economist Jeffrey Sacks, the Coen Brothers. When I was young, that’s where you would go for kosher meat and Jewish books. There are today about as many Jews in the Minnesota 5th as in the state of New Hampshire.

When the district elected Rep. Omar, an immigrant from Somalia and a Muslim and a woman, a lot of us native Minnesotans were very proud. The story of Somali immigration in Minnesota has at times been very difficult, and Jews have been active in fighting the anti-Muslim and anti-African bigotry surrounding the integration of Somalis. And that’s what has made the congresswoman’s recent statements particularly painful, for the rabbis and progressive Jews in the district.

Beyond what you’ve read in every article, Rep. Omar said a couple of other things at the DC bookstore where she spoke at length about a week and a half ago. She said that the Jewish constituents who have met with her to speak about her AIPAC comments talk about Jews in Israel as their family, but don’t seem to have actual family in Israel. She also said that the Jewish activists who have come never talk about the Palestinians and their suffering.

Rep. Omar is not telling the truth about the Jewish people she has been in touch with about all of this. I know who they are, and I can tell you that they include both moderates and progressives, including people from an organization called Jewish Community Action, a social justice group that my parents are often involved in. JCA members are people who have stood up previously to vouch for Rep. Omar publicly even when other Jewish groups haven’t, and who have been in vocal and active solidarity with Palestinians, even when that puts them at odds with others in the Jewish community. So Rep. Omar is either misrepresenting them, or somehow unable to hear them.

My friends who are in the thick of this in Minneapolis are befuddled and confused and angry. They don’t understand why Rep. Omar is invested in misrepresenting their views, and putting them as Jews in boxes where they are so clearly not. They do not feel that things are in a good place right now, despite a lot of dialogue. They who are up close are also committed to trying and trying again with her, and remaining in solidarity with the Muslim community in the district. As one of them put it a couple days ago: we are doing the best we can, and we are exhausted.

This is part of a larger story of Jews not being seen or acknowledged or even allowed in certain places on the activist left, unless they leave behind nuance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and agree not to say that there are Palestinian leaders who are also responsible for the fact that it continues.

Even on Thursday, the day of the House resolution against anti-Semitism and other hatreds, a fundraising letter went out from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez that said: “It’s official -- AIPAC is coming after Alexandria, Ilhan, and Rashida”, the three recently elected representatives from New York, Minnesota, and Michigan. Which is completely false. And the letter is easy to read as: the rich, bad Jews are going after us, and dividing us from the good Jews who support equality and would want to be with us.

And all of this is a form of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism does not have to come in the form of a white supremacist attacking a synagogue to deserve our attention, or to be a palpable threat to us. It is not all right ever for any political leader or any political movement, even while promoting other good things, to tell lies about Jews. It is not all right to say things that can easily be taken to justify terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

So what do the final chapters of the Megillah tell us, about our power in this kind of situation and the mitzvot we ought to be doing?

One mitzvah: We need to build alliances with the Achashverosh-es, to use our power so that people in positions of power want, and think it’s in their interests, to stand up for us or to stand behind us as we stand up.

One person I have been reaching out to is my own congresswoman, Rep. Annie Kuster. I wrote her a few weeks ago when this began to heat up, asking for her support on this question of “dual allegiance”, and more than that, asking her to reach out personally to Rep. Omar. Because both of them represent areas with small but politically active Jewish communities of the roughly same magnitude, and Rep. Kuster has such good relationships with me and many Jewish leaders and Jews who are prominent in New Hampshire Democratic politics. Annie has offered more than once to come to Beth Abraham and speak about her own experience visiting Israel and her views about the situation. She supports two states and has voted for Israeli military aid, and she is very well-informed. I suggested that she could talk with Rep. Omar about how she does this. I am pleased to tell you that I got not a standard note back, but a phone call from her office affirming her support for Israel. It's a conversation I intend to continue when I am in DC this coming week.

Another mitzvah from the end of the Megillah: We need to get and build our power so that we have the confidence to go to difficult places without fear for our safety. We, or at least some of us, need to be willing to go into difficult places where the anti-Semitic canards are incubating, and engage there. Those of us on or closer to the left need to take responsibility for talking with people on the left -- just as those on or near the right need to do it there.

So another thing I am doing: Last week at the monthly meeting of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council, I said that I know people are talking about Rep. Omar, and announced that I will have coffee with anyone who wants to talk about it. Many of the people in that group come from denominations or organizations that have supported boycotts of some sort against Israel. Before I left and in e-mails starting that day, people jumped up to tell me they want to talk. In response to one Facebook post, from an activist I know and respect, I held back the comment I was going to write but probably wouldn’t have been heard.  Instead I wrote my e-mail address in the comments with invitation to anyone on the thread to talk. And I separately reached out to the person who posted to get together, and we’re going to do that.

There is trust that I have built painstakingly with many people in the interfaith council, and I know we can talk. I am going to offer a class this fall, I decided this week in the fall in the RISE and OLLI programs -- about the Israel-Palestine conflict, from the Zionist viewpoint that I have described to you. I am a popular teacher there, and I know people will sign up.

We are fortunate in Greater Nashua that we have not been driven apart from other people whose causes we share because of Israel. There is no coalition here that I can’t be a part of so far because of my Zionism. I am much more interested in cultivating these local relationships and talking to people, really getting into questions and sharing information, about all the factors from Arabs and Israelis that have kept the conflict in place -- that is much more important for me to do than responding with a written public statement to everything that national actors say or do.

And a final set of mitzvot from the end of the Megillah. The practices that Esther and Mordechai instituted begin but do not end with retelling the dynamics of a past threat and how we fought it. On Purim, we read the Megillah twice, evening and morning. Twice we marinate in the story of the plot against our lives, rooted in statements about our disloyalty. But Esther and Mordechai wanted to make sure that the lesson of Purim was not just about remembering that, and not just about building ourselves up in anticipation of the next such battle. So they instructed us to do at least three acts on the day of Purim from an open heart and an outstretched arm. To send food to at least one friend, and to give to at least two people in need.

So a rule of thumb for today -- a 3:2 match. For every two acts of fighting anti-Semitism, three acts of compassion. One act to build up our own Jewish community in a joyful way. One act of being there when someone in our Jewish community needs comforting or needs help. And one act of standing up for a person or group outside of us who is the target of hate.

I have been trying to take this as well to heart. Because I've said these kinds of things out loud or published them, I was invited to give a blessing at the local African-American MLK event in January. There I heard a speech from a senior at Nashua North named Jamila-Ashanti Scales about all the racism that has been directed at her from grade school through high school. I offered to her that morning to be an ally if she ever needed one. Sure enough, two days later in the local paper, she was dragged into a conflict within the Board of Education, on the day of her final exams no less. I reached out to her family, who I know and some in our shul know, and asked what I could do. As a result, I published something supportive of her in the Telegraph, and I spent an hour with the school board members who were involved, cajoling them to make it right until they agreed to a step I suggested.

The last chapters of the Megillah are not easy ones, and the work we have in front of us right now is not easy. Why should it be. I don’t know, and my colleagues in Minnesota don’t claim to know, whether we’ll reach a good outcome with any specific leader we are at odds with. But I do believe that we can succeed and build here, where we actually have the power to influence people. We will not make everyone into lovers of Israel; that’s not the measure. But with hard and long work, we have it in our power to make the anti-Semitic into true fringes on the left and the right, and to help make all forms of bigotry a fringe within our own souls and our community.

And who knows, as the Megillah also says in a more familiar part, whether it was for a time like this that we have been given so much power.

Shabbat Shalom.

Chanukkah Is About Today

Each year in the Temple Beth Abraham bulletin I tend to write about the same thing at this time of year. This is as good as I've done so far in articulating why Chanukkah is important, and why it is important for American Jews at this holiday season. This is my December column:

You’ve probably heard over and over that Chanukkah is a “minor” holy day. Something we make a big deal about especially in modern America – something especially for Jewish children in a Christmas-saturated environment.

It’s true, Chanukkah is no Passover. But in fact, it’s not a new thing, the question about how significant Chanukkah really is. In fact, the Jewish religious authorities in the time of the Talmud were anti-Chanukkah. At a time when Jews were under the thumb of Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian emperors, the rabbis were none too keen on celebrating an uprising against imperial power. They managed to wrestle Chanukkah down to just a couple of paragraphs in the sprawling Talmud and left pretty much a story about divine light alone, the cruse of oil in the Temple that lasted eight days.

In fact, Chanukkah has always been about the relationship of Jews and Judaism to the majority culture, its values and its forces. That’s in fact what the original events were all about. So it’s worth taking an adult, “Judaism 201” look at the Chanukkah story.

The events of Chanukkah took place in the period of about 180-160 B.C.E. This was about 150 years after the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon, who brought the Land of Israel into the cultural and political world of Hellenism.

In many ways, Hellenism was the American culture of its time. There was a language, Greek, that spread to become a common language through much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Hellenism was a dominant world culture. Its positive elements included philosophy, art, and international trade that linked people together and brought prosperity and material advancement. The negative side of Hellenism included a worship of the physical body and a focus on beauty and strength above other values – pagan values.

The Jews in the Land of Israel, as well as those in exile all around the Mediterranean Sea, were deeply influenced by Hellenism. Each regional Jewish community faced the question of how much to adapt to Hellenism, whether to assimilate completely in part, or whether to remain separate.

It wasn’t a one-way street. Because the Hellenists valued learning and culture in general, some non-Jews learned about Judaism and decided that it was a kind of pure philosophy, a truth without all the trappings of pagan gods and rituals. About a century after Alexander the Great, who himself had been a student of Aristotle, the Torah was translated into Greek.

There was corruption among the kohanim, the priestly leadership of the Jews at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was not only a religious center, but a because of the gifts and offerings that people would bring. Ambitious people among the priests were vying for authority over the Temple. Some tried to curry favor with different imperial officials, by offering political support or outright bribes.

Just like today, the Land of Israel was situated geographically at a military and economic crossroads. Around the time of Chanukkah, in fact, the land changed hands. When Alexander died, his empire had been split in half, ruled from capitals in Egypt and in Syria. Initially the Egypt-based rulers controlled Judea, and they were on the whole tolerant of the Jews. But then the Seleucids, the “Syrian-Greeks” we know from the Chanukkah story, took over. Even then, the situation of the Jews did not change right away.

Then a new and crazy emperor, Antiochus IV, came to power in Syria. He believed that he was himself a god. He ordered the takeover of the Temple in Jerusalem and banned key Jewish practices. Some of the historical sources say that he took advantage of the weakness of both Jewish society and the officials beneath him. Others say that the Jewish assimilationists actively invited his intervention and his decrees.

The group we know as the Maccabees came to lead the revolt against Antiochus. They were themselves kohanim, but separate from the corrupt priests of Jerusalem. Their family name was Chashmonai; their patriarch was Matityahu (Mattathias) and his sons included Yehudah (Judah).

They believed in Jewish distinctiveness, but they also believed in some modern adaptation to Hellenism. So for instance, during their three-year revolt that begin in 165 B.C.E., they made certain decisions that were not so traditionally Jewish. They decided fighting on Shabbat was permitted in order to save lives. Their battle plan had some of the same features that the modern Israel Defense Forces would use in 1948 and 1967.

When they finally drove out Antiochus' forces, the Maccabees led both a traditional religious revival and a new approach to Jewish culture and power. They instituted a new annual festival, Chanukkah, but based it on the Sukkot festival that had gone unmarked in the Temple in the prior years. (That's initially why Chanukkah is eight days; the story of the oil came hundreds of years later.) They installed themselves as kings, even though they were not descendants of King David. Their leaders were known by both Hebrew and Greek names.

For me, celebrating Chanukkah reminds me that these issues of politics, value priorities, war, corruption based on money, and majority-minority relations are not new things. The candles remind me that light has to be shed on these matters, all the time.

The candles, against the darkness, are a symbol of the dedication and integrity it takes to keep our eyes open and to find and hold our moral center of gravity. The candles also remind me that Judaism could have been extinguished, could have burned out against all the political, military, economic, and cultural forces of that time. But it was not –Judaism bounced back, renewed and even began to reinvent itself.

So Chanukkah is not just a children’s story. And it resonates for us in America today for the same reasons it has resonated since the days of the Maccabees. Maybe it’s not Passover, but Chanukkah is hardly minor.

Chag Urim Same'ach – A Joyous Festival of Lights,
Rabbi Jon

Christmas Season Tips for Public Educators

Feel free to repost and forward this widely. I have a version of the exact same thing in a Word doc here as well.

With Thanksgiving just behind us, the Christmas season seems already in full swing. Did you know that in New Hampshire, only 60% of adults identify as Christian? About 5-10% identify specifically with a non-Christian religion. Of course, many people celebrate Christmas in some way whether or not they are religious, or even whether or not they are Christian. Still, in your classroom or in your school there may well be students for whom Christmas is not a part of their lives or their home. Or for whom there is a parent who does celebrate Christmas and a parent who does not, or who celebrate from each other.

I am a religious Jew, a parent of children in the public schools, and the rabbi of a synagogue. I can tell you that Jewish students, whether they are particularly religious or not, often feel uncomfortable at this time of year. Often they don’t express that until they are at home or in a Jewish group. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real.

So how should public educators approach Christmas?

Here are some ideas from my own point of view. I believe in public education as a proud graduate myself. I write from my own experience as a Jew and an educator,

The Big Picture

The simplest big picture: Sometimes, being in the minority feels good, because you are unique. Sometimes, being in the minority feels terrible, because you are left out. It can be the same student who has both feelings – at different times, or even the same time.

America is a majority Christian society in which many people are not Christian. This is one of any number of majority-minority dynamics that students experience in public school. Religion, culture, personality, political beliefs, talents, academic profiles – these are all differences can become salient at one time or another. Sometimes, a student feels like part of the majority some of the time and a minority at other times. Some students feel like part of a minority all of the time, or part of a majority all of the time.

Public schools exist to help every student learn how to navigate the different dynamics of majority-minority, in order to become the citizens who create and sustain a pluralistic and democratic society. Public school is where you learn how to be part of a group, how to be unique, and how to be an equal citizen with everyone else.

At your best, the schools that you run or teach in do this in a number of ways:

• You help students learn how to be part of an America that is bigger than our differences.
• You help students learn to be proud of their own backgrounds.
• You help students learn about each other’s backgrounds.
• You help students learn critical thinking skills, which they may one day apply to their own backgrounds and identities.
• You help students navigate questions and issues of power and fairness that come with difference, and the realities and feelings that arise from who is the majority and who is the minority in a particular situation.

Keep this big picture in mind, as you think about decorations you create, music you sing, movies you show, stories you read, and assignments in every discipline.

Tip #1: Know Your Students and Draw on Their Families

Do you know who celebrates Christmas and who doesn’t? If you intend to do anything related to Christmas and the winter holidays, find out who your students are.

Are you planning to read stories related to the season? Do you have art or music projects in mind? Are you planning a party? The parents of your students who have other winter holidays can be a great resource. Maybe they can recommend or bring in a story, or a special food. They might be able to recommend someone from the community who can do that if they themselves aren’t available.

It’s not about strict proportionality; there isn’t a formula for how to balance Chrismas and other holidays. If you are devoting some time to Christmas-themed learning, and you know that’s not part of the background of even a single student, make sure to devote time to learning about other religious cultures.

When in doubt, reach out. If one of your students looks uncomfortable, or just seems confused about something you assume everyone knows, ask the child and contact a parent. Everyone will appreciate that you care.

Tip #2: Make Sure Your Christmas Content Has a Purpose

As a Jew, I want my children to know things about Christmas. I want them to know that it is an important part of the religion of many of the people around them. While I don’t want them to feel bad or be put in an uncomfortable in school because of religious beliefs, I want them to know and appreciate the deep meaning that others get from Christmas and Christianity. I chose after all to live in a place where Jews are a small minority.

At the same time, I don’t want my children or any children to feel that for a whole month everything in school is about Christmas. So, by all means read stories that have interesting messages or convey history. Explain symbols that are common around us.

But…

Do not reward children for good behavior with notes from Santa’s elves. There are plenty of other ways that are just as good.

Don’t make them color or draw Christmas images, unless that is crucial to something you are teaching and you are also including something from another religious culture.

Don’t make a math assignment out of reindeer delivering Christmas gifts -- whether it’s a bar graph, an exercise about ratios, a word problem about speed and distance.

Tip #3: Look for Content That Models America Amid Difference 

I wish I could recommend the perfect book or story for every level specifically about this time of year. One of my own favorite examples of this kind of approach is a book about Thankgiving called Molly’s Pilgrim, by Barbara Cohen. Molly is a third-grade student whose family recently emigrated from Russia, and she is the only Jewish child in her class. An assignment to make a Pilgrim doll at home leads first to embarrassment for Molly on a few levels, but eventually she and her classmates see that the Pilgrim story encompasses Molly’s own.

Depending on the grade and the group, you might look up material about 1992-1994 in Billings, Montana, when an outbreak of violent anti-Semitism was met by churches and the local newspaper encouraging everyone in town to cut out Chanukkah menorahs (the traditional festival candle-holder) and put them in their windows.

Ask your school librarian, or Social Studies or Literature curriculum directors, what resources they know about!

Tip #4: Respect the Student Who Wants to Opt Out

There may be an assignment or project that because of Christmas, a particular student does not want to do. There may be a song for the chorus or the band that is too Christian for a particular student’s comfort.

Respect this. It’s a teachable moment, probably an issue of religious liberty, and for sure a chance to get to know your student.

Ask the student what she is thinking about. Find out what he is feeling. Applaud their willingness to stand up in a difficult situation that risks calling forth unwelcoming attention or negative consequences.

If there is an easy, non-punitive workaround or alternative, that’s great. But if there is not, no student should be penalized in the gradebook or the group for not being willing to do something that violates a boundary of right and wrong in the student’s eyes.

Tip #5: Pay Attention to What Happens Among Students

Listen in during group time, during unstructured time, during lunch and recess times. Look for teachable moments. If you hear someone say something insulting to another student about what that family does or does not do at this time of year, step in.

If you hear someone ask a curious question of another student, find a way to praise that later on. If you hear a lot of talk around any particular theme – from “What are you getting for presents?” to “What is Chanukkah anyway?” – find a way to plan a learning activity about generosity and giving, or about another culture’s winter festival.

Tip #6: If You Are Trying, Don’t Worry About Making a Mistake

There are no formulas here. Do your best! If say “Merry Christmas” to the Jewish student on the last day before vacation, don’t beat yourself up.

* * * * *

This season can be one of the most important for the mission of public schools. Feel free to reach out to me personally or any other local rabbi or synagogue if you are looking for a speaker or a story, or the answer to a question, or if you want to bounce something off of me. I can be reached by e-mail at rabbi@tbanashua.org, or by phone at (603) 883-8184 ext. 104.

Feel free to forward and share this around in all of your networks.

n.b. For some explanations about Chanukkah (including why it’s spelled so many different ways!), go to https://www.rabbijon.net/rabbijon/chanukkah.html.

After Pittsburgh: A Narrower Bridge, A Net Like Never Before

Here is my D'var Torah from Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018, the Shabbat after the killings at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh. You can read it or download it as a pdf file here.

It is so good to be here together this morning. I know that it is a great comfort to our friends, our sisters and brothers in Pittsburgh, to know that people are gathered in synagogues all over, thinking about them, mourning with them, and doing something to live in the legacy of the eleven people who were killed at Tree of Life Congregation, while they were doing what we are doing. I have been in touch with Jewish professional colleagues in Pittsburgh, and they are exhausted, and also amazing. It means a lot to them that we care and that we are here in our congregations this Shabbat.

We are drawn here this Shabbat, at a time when we need to reach beyond ourselves -- for the divine, for each other, and deep into ourselves. I know for me, having Shabbat waiting during a difficult week helps me find my footing -- knowing there will be a chance to take a breath, that precious words will be set up for me to sing with other people and say alone, that we will celebrate.  We are drawn to a Bat Mitzvah, so we can be inspired, and I want to acknowledge and thank Lexi and her parents, Matt and Kyle, for being Beth Abraham’s partners in this particular Shabbat which suddenly became different from what any of us anticipated.

I want to welcome you who have come for the occasion of Lexi’s Bat Mitzvah, and you who have come to be with us because all over America people have decided to join with the Jewish community, in solidarity and in defiance.

I hope all of you know that our synagogue leadership has been focused this week on taking care of you -- thinking about how you can be safe here, being available for you. We have had children and staff and members and guests here from first thing Sunday morning throughout the week. Many people have spent a lot of time going over security decisions and listening to anyone who has reached out and needed to talk on any level. I want to say a thank you to the Nashua Police Department for being so responsive to us from last Saturday onward, even anticipating our needs.

Last Saturday at the Tree of Life Congregation, eleven people were murdered and six were injured by a man who wanted to wipe out Jews, because he believes that we and the other people we stand by are a threat to white America.

And despite what he did, we have seen the unbelievable spirit of the Jewish neighborhood in Squirrel Hill, and the unstoppable force of mitzvah, even in the midst of horror and exhaustion.

The shomrim who stay with bodies before a Jewish burial who had to fulfill that responsibility at an active crime scene.The chevra kadisha groups who prepare bodies for burial, and the chevras from elsewhere who came to help, in case it was too much for the local people to bear to prepare friends whose bodies had been torn by bullets. The Jewish medical staff who treated and stabilized the gunman and even talked with him. Mitzvot are relentless.

I have had to give too many sermons at times like these. I have reread them all in the past few days. I don’t want to say the same thing again and again, with just the locations and details changed. I believe we are at a point of tremendous power and risk -- when we could tip into disillusionment, about anti-Semitism and white nationalism in this country -- or when we could help fuel a cascade in the other direction, the direction of tikkun. That would take some courage, and an ability to look hard into the darkness in new ways, but I believe the opportunity is there. And to Lexi, to you and to your classmates, I say that being Bat and Bar Mitzvah has never been more important, being a mitzvah person, and we need every single one of you to get to work with us.

I put on the study sheet a teaching from the Mishnah,the first book of Jewish law after the Torah, from about the year 200. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: I am like a man of seventy years, and I did not achieve an understanding of why the Exodus from Egypt is said at night until Ben Zoma explained this verse from the Torah to me: “In order that you will remember the going out from Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3) -- “the days of your life” means the days; “all the days of your life” means the nights. But the Sages say: “the days of your life” means this world; “all the days of your life” means to bring the messianic days. [Mishnah Berachot 1:5]

If you have been to a Passover Seder, you might recognize this paragraph -- it’s one of the paragraphs you might gloss over with discussion or event skip. But this week the passage called out to me all of a sudden, the way Torah does when we really need it.

The Talmud says Rabbi Elazar wasn’t actually old when he taught this teaching -- he was eighteen. But looking out on his world one day, he suddenly felt like he was seventy.

As though there would not be enough time in his life to see the world he was dreaming of. As though he couldn’t escape the trauma of the persecutions of Jews before his lifetime. One day at the age of eighteen, all his hair suddenly turned gray.

Rabbi Elazar was thinking about how we recall the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s is the original story of anti-Semitism, the first violent attack on Jews as a group for being Jews, the first time someone gives a supposed “reason” for that. Rabbi Elazar had seen this story as a story about the day of liberation -- about the march of the Jews into freedom at high noon, with their hands held high. As a story about light -- of a mighty God whose outstretched arm could overpower any worldly oppression.

Ben Zoma taught him that it wouldn’t be enough to tell that story that way -- you have to face the story of the night as well. The Exodus is the power of God on the side of the hated -- but it is also a story about that hate. The worry that it is not actually gone but just something we ran away from, that will find its way back to us again.

I used to think that there were two kinds of Jews: those who were obsessed by the darkness, and those who could see light and be inspired by it. And I had no patience once upon a time, for the Jews who chose to look at the darkness so much. But as my own hairs are slowly graying, I think I have started to get what Rabbi Elazar learned from Ben Zoma.

When you are basking in the light of Jewish freedom, don’t pretend there is no darkness. And when you are in the darkness, as we have been this week, don’t close your eyes to lights that might in fact be growing.

Yesterday, the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had, across the top, in large Hebrew print the words יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבה Yitgadal V’Yitkadash Sh’may Rabbah, the opening words of the Mourners’ Kaddish. And every single page of the paper’s desktop website had those words at the top. The business page, the sports page. Even the page with an article about the downtown Pittsburgh Christmas tree lighting. When has that ever happened?

Our U.S. Senator, Maggie Hassan, made phone calls this week to each one of the rabbis in New Hampshire personally. We are a minority in a small state, but Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein can’t do what she did.

It wasn’t for a perfunctory conversation. We talked for some 15 minutes, and she asked if there was anything specific we needed. We talked together about how all the different levels of hate and animosity today do or don’t interact. She said that I should tell you that tens of thousands of Granite Staters are thinking about us and standing with us.

Some of the most remarkable things have happened when Jews were not even around. I’ve been carrying with me all week these notes that the Unitarian Universalist Church took time in their service last Sunday to write us, adult words and some scribbles and pictures from children even. This is just one example of all the support sent to me and to us this week.

And at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Nashua, something happened last Sunday, which was a special day in their calendar, the anniversary of the founding of Lutheranism, of the day Martin Luther pinned his theses on the church door.

Pastor Dave said to the congregation that they could not just celebrate all the wisdom and leadership of Luther --  they also had to mention Luther’s anti-Semitism, and to mention how Luther’s words were later used by the Nazis. They didn’t talk about this because he and I had spoken, which we haven’t, or because we were there, because none of us were.

This is people who don’t know that many Jews being told that they have to reckon with their own religious group’s responsibility in the history of anti-Semitism. Not during an educational program, or a joint Holocaust remembrance. When has that happened?

I have long said that we live in a time when Jews have more more allies than ever before. And this week we can see that we are standing in a new daylight, as Jews in this country. This is not the same as what has been before. Somehow, even in the dark, we need to see that.

And yet, Rabbi Elazar learns from Ben Zoma that it is foolish to say this unless we have the honesty to talk about the night and face it. Night represents anti-Semitism lurking where we didn’t see it coming and we don’t expect it. Night is where the factors that drive anti-Semitism and white nationalism are hard to sort out, where the relationships among them are murky.

I was a person who shut my eyes to extent of American anti-Semitism especially in its white supremacist form, for years. Last week was the anti-Semitism of hate and violence, but there is also an anti-Semitism and a white nationalism of ideas that sound, like the new Pharaoh’s words at the start of Exodus, kind of reasonable to enough people.

This predates the president, and I said before the election from this pulpit that if he lost, I feared that we would think we were out of the woods. He is not an anti-Semite personally; the white nationalists revile him for having Jews in his family and his inner circle and his cabinet. And he is in the next room over, so to speak, calling his political opposition people who have “launched an assault... on the safety of every single American,” as he said in Texas the week before the shooting. That’s talking about born Americans, not even outsiders. It’s not surprising if someone who hears that, and already wants to intimidate or harm someone in a minority group, is emboldened. Not when so many people who we wouldn’t call white supremacists hear this kind of thing and cheer enthusiastically. In the dark, we don’t know how exactly how all of that stirs together, but it does.

I know a lot of you are on the very narrow bridge between hope and disillusionment. This week the bridge seems even narrower, and it takes courage to keep walking. We are in an unstable situation. It takes strength and balance not to fall off. But we have a net below us like we have never had. I no longer believe it’s enough to stand pat, just bank the relationships we have and grow them with interest. Now we will have to take some risks. But the chance of reward has never been greater.

Some of us have to risk a venture into the darkness. We have to go where people misunderstand us, or invite people who misunderstand us or haven’t thought about us, to come and talk with us. Even people who already have biases or stereotypes about us. Tomorrow I have a piece in the Nashua Telegraph inviting people to talk to me, to arrange to come to the synagogue or to invite me to speak somewhere, and any question is on the table, no matter how potentially offensive.

And some of us have to take the final step of the Mishnah, the argument that the Sages make against Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah -- that these stories have to impel us toward messianic days.

I ask myself -- when communities and churches were attacked in other places, why have I and why have we not responded with the kind of concern and love that others have shown to us this week? Where were our songs, our flowers, our offers of food? And truthfully, have we even been there this way when Israelis have been victims of terror?

And I remind us: that as tenacious as anti-Semitism and white supremcism have been, they are at least easy to denounce. But doing so does nothing about even more tenacious problems of poverty, suffering, and injustice in our society. Those can’t be solved by humanizing the other -- that just gets us, barely, to the starting line.

I do not want to feel old and spent, before I understand all of this.

If I am going to be old about these things, I want to be old like one of our oldest members. Where is Shirley?

Shirley is our fourth oldest member -- born in Europe, a person who knows what that world was that she and her family had to leave. She is 94.

When we had our service on Monday evening, with about 100 people, what Shirley wanted to say into the microphone most of all was this: that in the first day, the Muslim community in Pittsburgh took the initiative to raise tens of thousands of dollars to help the Jewish community. This is the same Shirley, who feels every act of anti-Semitism in the world, and every small bigoted insult about Jews where in the complex where she lives, piercing her inside.

I called her over after the service and remarked on that -- that you Shirley contain in yourself the most finely tuned sensitivity and worry about our place in the world as Jews, and also the ability to see generosity and support and possibility in that same world.

Shirley can tell you that this is a difficult place to live, almost unbearable. But that is precisely where we need to be. That’s the message of the Mishnah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Ben Zoma, and the Sages. I say, let’s be old like our 94-year-old Shirley, and let’s be young like our newest mitzvah-people, like Lexi and all you B’not and B’nai Mitzvah. You young people already have a head start on these challenges of this world. Pull us with you back toward the idealism we need.

This week we have mourned, and we have looked at the darkness, but we can also tell a story of light, and even see to bringing our world toward messianic days. I will not let the gunman or the supremacists take my faith in America from me. I will be ever grateful for all of you here, for those who are with us, and for those who inspire us.

We will talk more and make plans. Anti-Semitism and white supremacism are violent, and they are largely built on words -- words that trick and deceive, words that bully, words on the web and words between people. We will fight it and we will defeat it with our own words -- words that love, words that encourage, words between people and even words on the web. Words that describe the real world and words that describe the world we dream of.

May God and may this gathering of ours bring some comfort to all those mourning those were killed in Pittsburgh, and may our lives make their memories a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

The Elul Love Your Neighbor Study Challenge

Dear Friends:

This Shabbat is the first day of Rosh Chodesh Elul, the new moon marking one month before Rosh Hashanah. I want to invite all of you into a challenge with me: the Elul Love Your Neighbor Study Challenge.

Part of the process of teshuvah (returning, redirecting ourselves) is studying what the Torah says about relationships between people and our responsibilities in the world. One of the unique ways the Jewish community can reshape the world in the new year is by bringing into action our teachings about compassion and justice.
 
What better way to start doing both of those things than to study this month a verse that is at the literal center of the Torah: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ V’ahavta l’ray’acha kamocha “Love your neighbor as yourself”
 
The tradition of Jewish commentary on this phrase, each word within it, and its context in the Torah make clear that this is not some vague and gooey teaching. Rather, it opens up a set of challenges and questions that we have to figure out how to apply in our personal lives and as citizens.
 
The challenge:
I would like to study this verse during the month of Elul, between now and Rosh Hashanah, with at least 75 people. I hope many will be people who don’t already usually study Torah.
 
When and How:
If you are interested in hosting a study salon at your home, or setting up some study time with me for yourself or a small group at the synagogue or another place, contact me as soon as possible! Or, come to one of these ready-made opportunities:
 
Love Your Neighbor Café (coffee, tea, etc are on me!)
Thursday, Aug. 16 10:00-11:00 a.m. A&E Coffee Roasters, 135 Rte 101A, Amherst
Friday, Aug. 17 10:30-11:30 a.m. Buckley’s Bakery and Café, 436 Daniel Webster Hwy, Merrimack
Wednesday, Aug. 22 1:00-2:00 p.m. The Village Bean, 33 Indian Rock Rd (Rte 111), Windham
Tuesday, Aug. 28 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Riverwalk Café, 35 Railroad Square, Nashua
 
Lunch Hour Torah – call in or participate by video through the web
12:00-1:00 p.m. Aug. 14, 22, or 30
Just click https://zoom.us/j/5530075723 or call (929) 436-2866 or (669) 900 6833, use meeting ID 553 007 5723

Beit Midrash In-Depth Study Session – 2 Hours of Torah (With Snacks)
6:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday, August 16 and Tuesday, August 28
at Temple Beth Abraham (20 minute interlude for minyan at 7:30 p.m.)
 
I hope this sparks many conversations. I know I will learn a lot through this learning together, about ethics and relationships and even politics, and we will figure out ways to share what we learn. I'll post updates on how far we are toward the surface goal of the challenge, and include a small taste of the topic in my regular Elul e-blasts.

May this be a step toward a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet New Year!

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov, a good new month,
Rabbi Jon

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

How to Use and Not Use Biblical Verses in Politics

This was my D'var Torah last Shabbat (June 16, 2018), in response to the back-and-forth between religious groups and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what the Bible says about the policy of separating parents and children when families are suspected of crossing the U.S. border illegally.

One afternoon a young yeshiva bocher, a student immersed in the study of the tomes of the Sages, was on his break. He was wandering around the Bes Medrash, the library, going from aisle to aisle. Among all the tall and thick rabbinic treatises and commentaries, he came upon a book that was noticeably smaller than all the rest. He took it from the shelf and began paging through, and suddenly his face burst into a smile. The book was a Tanakh -- a Bible. The young yeshiva bocher took the book and sprinted to the study of the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva, and he screamed in excitement:

“Rebbe! You’ll never guess what I found! It’s a book full of quotations from the Talmud!”

This is often how the Bible is used -- it’s subordinate to something else. I’m poking fun at the world of traditional Jewish learning, but we see this too in politics, in political argument. I want to teach you two terms from the Talmud that I bet you’re going to want to start using -- and one is in Aramaic, so you will really sound like you’re in the know to boot. The terms are: מִדְרָשׁ midrash and אַסְמַכְתָא as’mach’ta.

Midrash is a word you may know -- it means inquiring into the meaning of words from Torah, digging into them, trying to figure out what the original words are saying as they apply to a situation today. As’mach’ta means, a prop. It’s the same root as a word you may know from the prayers, סוֹמֵךְ נוֹפְלִים somaych noflim, the one who holds up the fallen. As’mach’ta is when you don’t have a good argument, so you prop up your view with a verse from the Bible. Slapping a verse next to something for decoration. Or as’mach’ta is when you don’t really care whether people pay attention to your real argument -- but there’s a verse that’s related so you tack it on and figure people will pay attention to that.

In the Talmud, the rabbis often bring up biblical verses in the course of discussion, and they ask each other -- is that midrash or as’mach’ta? Is that your argument, are you really asking the verse what it says, or are you just trying to buy the power of a biblical verse without paying for it? The rabbis in the Talmud even have a way of rolling their eyes in writing when sniff out a weak as’mach’ta. You call that an argument? It’s just אַסְמַכְתָא בְּעַלְמָא as’mach’ta b’alma. That’s the yeshiva bocher, who finds a Bible in the house of study and thinks it’s just a book of things rabbis say to decorate an argument they are making.As I say, I’m really talking about the Bible and politics. When you hear the Bible quoted, when is it midrash, when is it really digging in for wisdom, for challenging the world, and when is it just as’mach’ta, a cheap trick to borrow some gravity and power and substance when it’s not really there?

This week we had a battle of the Bible verses, on the subject of immigration and in particular the policy of the United States at the borders of our country, to take children far away from their parents if they arrive illegally. On one side, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions -- and on the other one side, well..... the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a whole bunch of others of us.

This week, at their national convention, the Southern Baptists passed, as they have before, a resolution on immigration reform including the principle of family unity, protesting at about the border. They gave a strong affirmation of the value and dignity of immigrants, making a whether Christian or not, and they issued a call to political leaders and clergy to speak and take action.

They quoted Genesis, Leviticus, and the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and also the Christian Bible of course.

Attorney General Sessions gave a speech this week in direct response to the Southern Baptists. We should always read the whole speech before reacting, check what’s in the press, make sure they aren’t quoting out of context. His whole speech is in fact on the Department of Justice website already. This is some of what he said, and while it’s not the whole thing I’m not omitting any words in the middle.

“Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families.Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law.

“First- illegal entry into the United States is a crime—as it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.

“Our policies that can result in short term separation of families is not unusual or unjustified. American citizens that are jailed do not take their children to jail with them....”

The attorney general quoted from an epistle of Paul in the Christian Scriptures, but he could have just as easily cited from chapter 29 of Jeremiah, the same Jeremiah the Baptists quoted.

Bible and Bible. I know, I hope, that we’re agreed about the cruelty of this policy; I hope there is one vision here you find more compelling, for a whole lot of reasons. But this is a biblical standoff, and what do we do with that? If one side has their verses and one side has theirs, what do we mean when we say that one side is right, other than -- it’s what I already think, so that’s what right? Is the Bible really adding anything here? It’s very important to me that your response to this isn’t: anyone can just find a verse for anything.I want to give you a way to think about this, and it includes a challenge even if you know this week who you agree with. It’s not about who has the best interpretation of a specific biblical verse. I think the most important way to think about this battle of the Bible verses is: midrash vs. as’mach’ta. Who is really searching the meaning of the verse, and who is just propping up their view with a shiny ornament.

I think of the Bible like the equalizer on a stereo or amp, in your living room or on the stage of an arena. On a good stereo, a good amp there is a series of dials -- from deep bass to high treble -- and each one corresponds to a different part of the sound, and you can adjust each one of them separately. You can silence one completely, or crank it up pretty high.

And the Bible is like that. Every verse in the Bible is like one of the dials on the amplifier of the Divine Voice. The question is: how much are you cranking up the level on each dial? When you are presented with a question of today, a question of policy, what does your whole equalizer look like?

There is one dial that should always be cranked up; it’s the fundamental bass all the time. It’s in Genesis 1, the verse that reads: ‘God created the human being in God’s image.” וַיִבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ Vayiv’ra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo. When it comes to that dial, to paraphrase Spinal Tap -- ours goes to 11, all the time. If someone is quoting the Bible about a public policy issue and they don’t have that dial cranked up to the maximum -- you should stop listening. You know there is no midrash there, only as’mach’ta.

But after that, every verse has a range of settings that could be appropriate. Even the ones like what the Attorney General quoted. As long as you are thinking about how to set the dials, you are doing midrash -- you are inquiring into the sound of each verse, the setting of each dial. How that verse or that combination of verses, mixed in different ways, vibrates, penetrates your thoughts and grabs your emotions, stimulates your nerves and flexes your muscles into action. It should make you tremble, or move you to a joyful noise.

These past three years in particular, I have been thinking about all kinds of verses relevant to issues of immigration. About ahavat ha-ger, loving the stranger, and its relationship to v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha, loving the neighbor. The relationship between loving the stranger and not oppressing the stranger, which in different verses are about economics, power, or the words we use. These verse don’t all say the same thing. How high should each one be set? And what about the kinds of verses like the one the Attorney General quoted?

If you never mess with the dials, if you set them once upon a time and never change them, then I don’t care what your view is, you are doing as’mach’ta -- the Torah is just a prop. The verse isn’t really for meaning or argument, it’s not revelation, it’s just plastic decoration.

There are verses that should have a maximum setting, and some that should have a minimum. To me, when it comes to the Bible and public affairs, we always have to remember that every word of the Torah was revealed in opposition to the powers of the world, to people emerging from slavery or to prophets calling kings and leaders to account. So Attorney General Sessions has his settings wrong, in the sense that his verse about orderly government can be more than zero, but it is set too high, and his image of God setting is far too low. And you can tell that for him it’s just as’mach’ta, and not midrash. He doesn’t hear the other verses at all. And even the verses he cites aren’t really where he learned his views about government and law. They are just for effect; the verses aren’t making him tremble.

At the same time, you can’t set your levels just once, to vibrate with one political party or movement. There is “love the stranger”, and there is a minimum that that verse should never be set below. But there are other dials too -- and any party or movement or leader who doesn’t allow you to fiddle with the levels, becomes a power that also has to be critized and corrected. If you zero out every dial but one, if you hear only one verse or just a few verses, and that’s all you want or all you get coming out of your stereo -- even if it’s Tzelem Elohim, the image of God -- then you’ll stop trembling, you won’t be moved to a joyful shout.  Your sound will be tinny, not rich and lush, and that is not midrash. Our political friends too can make our verses no longer resonate, if they turn off all the other dials. Just because we like it doesn’t mean this isn’t also using the Bible as as’mach’ta, a prop, a talisman.

There is right or wrong about the separation of families at the border -- and it’s wrong. But when it comes to how the Bible speaks to that, what I’m listening for is right or wrong and also more -- it’s midrash or as'mach'ta. I believe the religious folks this week are more right than the Attorney General, and partly it’s because they have a richer sound. They bothered to set a bunch of dials, and the Attorney General sounds like he set only one, and he did it once and has never gone back. They did midrash, and he just did as’mach’ta.

Let’s not any of us settle for biblical verses as as’mach’ta, even when we are surely right. We must never get in a position where the citation of a verse from the Bible is ho-hum. The Bible might be the smallest book on the shelf when it comes to public policy -- but it should pulse in a way no other resource does. It should not just inform our policies, but stretch our humanity. When you think you have the truth, that’s when you should check the levels every time, to make sure they are right each time you listen, each time you perform the sounds. That’s what will make the verses of Bible matter. Especially when we’re right about an issue that affects lives, life and death -- especially then, we as Jews, as religious people, should be the ones teaching verses from the Bible as midrash -- making the sound of justice better, sweeter, edgier, richer, so that the voice of the living God vibrates like a revelation, penetrating thoughts and grabbing emotions, stimulating nerves and flexing muscles into action.

 

Shabbat Shalom.

 

Bring Philip Roth to Shul Day

This was my Dvar Torah on May 26, for Parashat Naso.

I know one person, and maybe only one, who would have loved the beginning of this Torah reading – Philip Roth, the great American Jewish author who died this week at the age of 85. He was not really a Torah person, but the scenario about a jealous husband suspicious of his wife would have been right up his alley. And the best part for Roth might have been where the Kohen writes down a curse with the name of God and dissolves it into bitter water. The one time that we are actually commanded to erase God’s name, which is one of the blasphemies of the Torah! Philip Roth, may his memory be for a blessing, was insistently anti-religious and was called blasphemous plenty of times, from plenty of pulpits. His characters were often Jewish but he fought against being called a Jewish writer. He might have just loved that opening passage -- and I’m just as sure he would hate the idea that rabbis would make him the subject of a sermon in the synagogue.

In recent years a lot of Jews like us reclaimed Philip Roth, or felt he had come back to us, after his novel The Plot Against America in 2004, in which he imagined the anti-Semite Charles Lindberg becoming president at the time of World War II. But I’d like to go back to the beginning of his career, to story from 1958. When Roth was 25 years old, he published a wicked funny and wickedly funny short story in the Paris Review called “The Conversion of the Jews.” The following year it was published with a few others at the end of his first novel, Goodbye Columbus.

It’s set in a fifth- or sixth-grade yeshivah class, where one of the boys, Ozzie Freedman, loves to pester Rabbi Marvin Binder with questions. All the other boys, like his good friend Itzie Lieberman, just want to keep quiet and laugh and make faces and obscene gestures behind the rabbi’s back. But Ozzie asks questions. Like why the rabbi can call the Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal. And why, when a plane crashed at LaGuardia and 58 people died, the fact that eight of them were Jewish made it a tragedy. Mrs. Freedman had already been called in to speak to Rabbi Binder because of those two questions. The rabbi had answers, but Ozzie kept saying, “I’m asking something different.”

Now for a third time Mrs. Freedman has to come in, and this is why. For some reason Rabbi Binder was talking about Jesus in class – the rabbi brought it up, Ozzie says -- and how Jesus was a historical person and not God. And Ozzie tells Itzie how he asked, after a very dramatic introduction about God’s powers of creation: “Anyway, I asked Binder if He could make all that in six days, and He could pick the six days He wanted right out of nowhere” --  why God couldn’t make a woman have a baby without a human father.

Itzie, his friend, is more interested in the sex part of the question. Maybe Rabbi Binder is upset about both. Anyway, Rabbi Binder reiterated that Jesus is not God, and Ozzie explains to his friend, “I understood that. What I wanted to know was different.”

It happens on a Friday, and Ozzie is going to tell his mother about what happened and why she was going to be summoned again. It’s just the two of them, his father is no longer living, and first Mrs. Freedman lights the Shabbat candles. I just love Roth’s description of how she appeared to Ozzie: “When his mother lit candles she would move her arms slowly towards her, dragging them through the air, as though persuading people whose minds were half made up. And her eyes would get glassy with tears… Even when she was dressed up she didn’t look like a chosen person. But when she lit candles she looked like something better; like a woman who knew momentarily that God could do anything.”

But when Ozzie finally fesses up, his mother smacks him in the face, the first time she’s ever done that.

The following Wednesday arrives, the day of the meeting with the rabbi and Ozzie’s mother. There is some time at the end of the class day, so Rabbi Binder says there will be open discussion on any question. No one has any questions, and Ozzie doesn’t want to say another word. But Rabbi Binder makes him stand up and ask a question. Ozzie finally screams out another version of his question about God. The rabbi flips out, so does Ozzie, and eventually Ozzie runs out of the classroom and onto the roof and he locks the door behind him.

All the kids run outside the building, the firemen are called, and Ozzie’s mother too. Ozzie threatens to jump, and makes the firemen with their net chase as he trots from one side of the roof to another. One of my favorite characters in the story is the custodian or caretaker, Yokov Blotnik, who is capable of only two ways of evaluating any situation – good-for-the-Jews and no-good-for-the-Jews. That’s with hyphens – good-for-the-Jews, no-good-for-the-Jews. Ozzie’s mother pleads with him to come down from the roof: “Don’t be a martyr.” But his friend Itzie yells up to the roof, “Gawhead, be a Martin!” And all the boys begin to chant, “Be a Martin! Be a Martin!”

Eventually, Ozzie says that he will come down safely if Rabbi Binder says in front of everyone that God can make anything. And then he has to say that God could have made Jesus, and then he makes everyone bow on the ground and say it. He makes his mother promise that she will never hit anybody about God – probably the truest thing anyone in the whole story says -- and everyone repeats that too. And he jumps down – safely, we think, “right into the center of the yellow net that glowed…like an overgrown halo.”

I think everyone who teaches Hebrew School should have to read this story every year.

Anyway, what kind of a story is “The Conversion of the Jews”? Maybe it’s just plain satire; maybe it’s just a great example of in a Jewish tradition making fun of cheders and befuddled rabbis. Maybe Ozzie Freedman is just an annoying pisher, a nudnik who happens to be clever. Maybe Philip Roth wasn’t yet one of the greatest authors in America, but a 25-year-old kid with an audience, horsing around.

But one of Philip Roth’s themes was about writing itself, and how authors were constantly facing audiences who came up with their own sometimes-crazy theories of what the author had in mind. That was one of his favorite subjects.

So Philip Roth said he wasn’t a Jewish writer, not interested in Jewish questions… well, bigshot author, may your memory be for a blessing, I’m bringing you to shul, and this is why.

Because this one short story has all the characters we are still grappling with six decades on:

The one who can only think in terms of good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.

The one, the poor rabbi, who is trying to wrap his head around America and the Christian majority, and who is smart and wants to be relevant, but just can’t keep up with these kids who are more American than he is.

The kids in the story represent two incredibly important types of American Jews. The one who has all the right questions about being Jewish in America, and thinks there must be a good answer, a good Jewish answer, but can’t find anyone who knows how give it to him.

The group, who are probably the most classic Philip Roth-y, who are just living in the moment and in the physical, in the body.

That’s four sons, Seder style, and Roth does it for laughs. (I’m not sure what to do with the mother – a feminist writer, he was not.)

There is no chacham in the story, no upstanding and coherent wise man in sight. Roth’s critique of religion was summed up by my friend and critic Stephen Hazzan Arnoff: “Roth desires to shove traditional answers about ethereal questions aside because of their perceived attachments to religious absurdity, oppression, or boredom.”

That’s what the kids in the story hate – absurdity, oppression, and boredom. Ozzie thinks his rabbi is absurd and oppressive. Itzie and the others think he is oppressive and boring. And we know that for a whole generation or two of Jews in America, when Philip Roth was becoming a great writer, that was the problem with our synagogues and with our neighbors’ churches. And by the time we religious leaders got wise to it, by the time we were trying to respond, a lot of people were…. asking something different.

Roth is important in the synagogue because he represents both the wicked child of the Seder, and a new one, the one who has no interest anymore in asking. So religious Jews and rabbis hated him, or ignored him back, for a long time.

But I think we should honor Philip Roth in shul during his shiva, and give him his due for holding up a mirror to us shul people. For laughing at us and making us laugh at ourselves, if we’re smart enough to do that. In one hand, we need to be carrying Heschel, who was writing at the exact same time and scolding us for the exact same reasons and lecturing us to change before it’s too late. In the other, Philip Roth, laughing at us.

We should honor Philip Roth for reminding us that hearing his questions is not the same as giving a satisfying answer.

And as we remember Philip Roth, we have to give him his due as a Jewish artist of American individuality. He didn’t claim to be anyone’s leader, to give an answer to anything. He was a writer, accountable only to his individual voice. We ought to remember -- we who want people to come to synagogues -- that each Jew out there is an individual, observing and writing and creative about their lives. And we won’t know anything until we read all their stories the way they write them, in their own distinctive and beautiful way. Even when they make fun of us. Even when they point out what seems absurd, oppressive, or boring. If we’re going to offer an answer, we’re going to have to do it at Philip Roth’s level -- just as beautiful, just as interesting, and just as funny.

For Our Lives

My D'var Torah on March 24, 2018, the day of the national "March for Our Lives" after the Parkland school shooting.

Somewhere in America, for fifteen years a fifth-grade teacher used to conclude the week on Friday the same way. She would ask her students to write down the names of four children they’d like to sit with the following week, and to nominate one student as an “exceptional classroom citizen” for the week.

The point of this exercise was not to make the next week’s seating chart. Nor was it to decide who was that week’s exceptional classroom citizen. Instead, this teacher would go home on Friday afternoon and read all the slips of paper. She would ask herself:

• Who is not getting requested by anyone else?
• Who doesn’t even know who to request?
• Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?
• Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

The fifteen years of this practice for this teacher began on Friday, April 23, 1999. The Friday following the murders at Columbine High School.

I know about this teacher because someone surfaced an article about her a few weeks ago, after Parkland. The article is entitled, “This Brilliant Math Teacher Has a Formula to Save Kids’ Lives”, and I believe it.

The article was written by a parent of one of the students in that class, a writer named Glennon Doyle Melton with a blog called “Momastery.” She’s the author of books like Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed. So she’s the kind of writer who can totally say that this teacher is a “Love Ninja.... It’s like taking an X-ray of the classroom.”

Her child’s teacher was looking for who is connected and who is not, who is suffering from suddenly being disconnected -- who is bullying others and who is being bullied. She created her Friday practice to save lives. The lives of those potentially killed by school shooters, the lives of those potential shooters, and of course the lives of all those who might be in danger of depression, suicide, turning to substances.

Today a lot of people aren’t at shul because of the March for Our Lives. In the words of the organizers, it’s “kids and families...demand[ing] that their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence and mass shootings in our schools today.”

The weeks since the Parkland shooting have surfaced those feelings and perceptions -- that teens, and not just teens but a lot of younger kids, and parents, are not being heard when they talk about not feeling safe, not having their lives valued or the lives of their children valued. I think this is about gun violence and more. Whether it’s these March marches or #metoo, 5778 has been a year when people are working on both the obvious and concrete level -- about guns and law enforcement -- and the deeper levels, about isolation and about relationships going awry. Lives are at stake, because of guns but a lot more as well.

Here are three things I know:

*In high schools in Greater Nashua and all over New Hampshire, in 2015 more than 1 in 4 kids reported feeling helpless for at least two straight weeks in the past year. Which is, believe it or not, below the national average of 30%.

*In high schools in Greater Nashua and all over New Hampshire, in 2015 4 out of 5 kids said they would not talk to their parents about negative emotions. (Note -- these two facts are from the 2017 Greater Nashua Community Health Assessment)

* If there is a common thread among school shooters in particular, it is that they tend to talk to friends and sometimes teachers and tell them that they are depressed, thinking about suicide, thinking about killing other people. (Cited here on fivethirtyeight.com)

Those three things are in the data. Which means that there are so many opportunities not just to find the person so late in the process, thinking about committing an act of violence, but also those who are vulnerable in other ways, or just starting to be vulnerable.

According to the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot (3:14), Rabbi Akiva used to say: Beloved is every human being, who was created in the image of God -- chaviv adam she-nivra b’tzelem. It is an even greater love that it was made known to her, to him, that she was created, that he was created, in the image of God -- chibbah y’teirah noda’at lo she-nivra b’tzelem.

That’s the brilliance of the fifth grade teacher with her Friday slips of paper. We all know, we all say, that every child is precious. But does every child know that someone thinks that about her, about him? Does every child -- or for that matter, every person -- know that someone is thinking about him, interested in her, concerned?

I have been thinking about how to be that teacher. I have here a list I printed of all the teenagers in our community, who have passed through here, currently ages 12-19. How many do you think there are? .... It’s about 150.

I know things about a lot of them. But they don’t all know that I do, or that I bothered to make this list. 

I know that some are happy and some are not; some are connected and some are not. Some are doing well in school, some are not in school. Some are working and some are in college and some are doing neither. Some are lonely and some are popular, and some are both.

I don’t what kind of week more than a few of them have had. My fantasy is to call all of them, or all their parents. But of course that’s not possible.

But what is possible is for us, collectively, to see these 150 as the image of God, and to let them know that they are. And I don’t mean just to value them to the extent they have accomplishments, whether it’s on the bimah or on sports fields or on performance stages. To value them for why they care about what they care about, even if it seems quirky or random. To value them for the mystery each one presents. To enjoy them, even when they are quiet.

It’s possible, especially for someone who is not your child -- to help them know that you know they are the image of God.

I say all the time that what we do here, in the synagogue on Shabbat, makes a difference out in the world, an ethical difference and even a civic difference. This is one of those things where it’s true in a very concrete sense. Do you want to reduce youth violence or bullying or suicide in America? Value a child or a teen in this community.

Because it’s been shown that, in the words of one study on development, “The single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult.”

Imagine if our community was a big version of that one fifth grade teacher. Imagine if that’s what this list meant to us, collectively, every week on Friday before Shabbat.

When the marchers talk about about kids’ and families’ lives and safety, we should understand that they are talking about more than heading off the shooter who might harm someone. They mean, even if they don’t know it, that we should care about their lives and safety all the time in all kinds of ways.

We will never do this well enough, and even with all the fifth-grade teachers and model communities, there is the who-knows reality of the world -- which is why we also have to do everything possible to keep dangerous weapons out of anyone’s hands. We have to make it easier and more standard for teachers or counselors or law enforcement to share information and do something when they learn of a potentially violent person. They are understaffed and overworked, and probably undertrained. We citizens have to let them know that we regard this aspect of their work as not just din but also rachamim -- not just enforcing and following rules, but an aspect of compassion for each person they flag and each person they protect.

Beloved is every human being, who was created in the image of God. It is an even greater love that it was made known to her, to him, that she was created, that he was created, in the image of God.

That’s what it means to be a caring and nurturing community. That’s what it means to be like blogger Glennon Melton, a warrior living unarmed. May we make all our children know what we know, that they are created in the image of God.

Shabbat Shalom.